Usability: July 2006 Archive Page

RideMax is a computer software program guaranteed to help you save time waiting in line at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.

RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized. --Experience Disney Without the Long Wait! (ridemax.com)

What a great niche market! A classic entrepreneurial example of finding a void, turning it into a need, and filling it.

Thanks for another great suggestion, Rosemary.

--Blender for the Faint Hearted -- 06: Material Basics, Part 2 (SciFi Meshes)

I've been working with the open source 3D design tool "Blender." It's powerful. Very powerful. It's got an overwhelming number of buttons, and the existing documentation is incomplete.

I have asked Seton Hill to purchase a handful of copies of a professional 3D design tool, but even the student copies of that cost hundreds of dollars, so I'm not asking my New Media Projects students to shell out that much money.

I've just spent hours trying to figure out how to create multiple materials that are attached to a single object. Right now I'm working on a chair, and I want the base to be one color and the cushion to be a different color. Actually, "color" isn't the right term -- I want the base to be hard plastic and the cushions to be shiny leather. This means that, instead of just determining the color, I'm also determining the glossiness of the surface. If I wanted to create transparent or reflective objects, I can do that, too.

By clicking buttons at random, I managed to create several different materials for a project I've been working on last week, but at the time I really didn't know what I was doing, and I couldn't reproduce what I did when I tried just now.

At any rate, this tutorial expalains what I was trying to do.

I'm a strong supporter of open source software. The Blender Foundation is fully aware that people find its software bewildering and its documentation incomplete. The "Summer of Documentation" is a project designed to tackle that -- experienced Blender users are writing tutorials to fill the gaps. I'm looking forward to reading those tutorials as they come out, but unfortunately for me I've got the time now, and won't have much time to learn Blender once the semester starts.

I do plan to contribute to the existing wiki documentation, so that others will benefit from my struggle.

I do wish there were an "easy mode" interface that turned off features that newbies won't need... and then maybe the documentation could tell you which features to activate as you progress through the tutorials and need access to more powerful features. But it's also probably fair to say that most users of Blender probably have significant computing experience. They won't be thinking of writing comprehensive tutorials for non-programmers.

Ah, well. Back to work.

--Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Beginning Tips (Wikibooks: Blender 3D)

This is just what I was looking for.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should go for broke and introduce my "New Media Projects" students to 3D design for Half-Life 2, where the results will be stunning but the process more fragmented, or be less of a trail-blazer and take advantage of the existing EduFrag community (using Unreal Tournament 2004, which features a more advanced IDE that integrates the design tasks, thus cutting down on the number of times students will have to use little stand-alone applets to convert graphics files and such).

I still want to use the Half-Life 2 system for my own work, but I'm beginning to think that the less-complex UT2004 system will still teach the concepts I want to teach.

--Troy Sterling and the Active and Passive Verbs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I created this with Impress, the Open Office slideshow presenter, and exported it as a Shockwave file. I'm amazed at how tiny the resulting file is. It looks like a few effects didn't make the transition, but they were just eye candy.

I designed this as a simple linear slide show, for me to present in the front of the room. In this online version, all you can do is click to advance to the next page. It should at least have multiple-choice questions, in order to ensure that a bored reader isn't just clicking through on autopilot. (At any rate, it's more entertaining than my more traditional online guide to Active and Passive Verbs.)

This is just a bit of practice, as I continue to experiment with various media production tools.

I've also downloaded Jahshaka, an open-source video editing tool, but it crashed on my little wimpy laptop. I'll try it again when I get some time at the office.

--The Information Machine (YouTube)

A fascinating vintage piece of rhetoric. It skips a bit in the opening, but settles down quickly.

The images of room-sized computers and stacks of punch cards made me swoon. The narrator's patient voice and the final image -- of a rose fading into a heart -- show an concerted effort to make computer technology into a continuation of the human effort to make functional and beautiful order out of the world, rather than something to fear.

Note the gender-specific roles assigned to the cartoon characters -- a room full of white-coated female operators of some sort is followed by a very white, very male boardroom. We can't fault the film too much for being a product of its time, of course.

The content is visionary for 1957, the year of Sputnik, when science fiction heroes were battling giant mosters and robots that looked like walking water coolers. It's also interesting to see how computer scientists introduced the idea of mathematical simulation to the general public.